Rembrandt, The Last Supper, after Leonardo da Vinci

While this drawing is based on Leonardo’s fresco, his Last Supper in Milan, it is considered one of Rembrandt’s finest sheets, certainly one of his finest examples of work in red chalk. Using a hard chalk, he laid out in a very deliberate way, the structure of the fresco. He then took a softer red chalk, producing a very dark, almost oxblood red hue, and using very few strokes, he’s re-outlined the expressions of the figures. It’s fascinating that Rembrandt was so confident as a draftsman, he felt no need to erase earlier lines. The figure of Christ, for example, is first drawn in that hard, light chalk as a much younger man. And then he changed his mind as he went in with the second campaign of red chalk, and gave Christ a much more resigned, elderly, fragile, sorrowful expression. He is responding to his own words, where he blesses the bread and blesses the wine and presents it to the apostles as his body and blood. The density of lines enhances the extraordinary emotion of the moment. The lines are sort of atmospheric lines that denote motion of figures as they respond so viscerally to this declaration. There’s a very rich sense of communal emotion, and yet each has a highly individualized facial structure. In the original fresco, the dining hall is austere, in perfect symmetry, classical. Rembrandt has ignored that architecture entirely, he has truncated space to heighten the expressive communication of the apostles. The paradox, of course, is that he never saw the fresco. Rembrandt never went to Italy, but in fact he had to use a black and white engraving. What is awfully interesting about this drawing is that Rembrandt has signed it. He has taken the impetus from Leonardo da Vinci and made the subject his own. He made this a Rembrandt drawing. It’s an homage of sorts to Leonardo, and yet it stands alone as one of the most arresting, affecting, brilliant studies in red draftsmanship.